(RNS) — With two new congregations led by and for African American and Caribbean Jews, Washington, D.C. is emerging as a center of Black Jewish life in the United States.
Ohel Eidot Chemdat’a (“Tent of the Precious Congregations”), or OEC for short, will hold its first Shabbat evening service in a rented building in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on March 20. The group’s founder, Rabbi Shais Rishon, will lead the service.
“Every other Jewish ethnicity or culture gets to have its own space,” Rishon, a prolific writer and speaker who is best known in the Jewish world by his pen name, MaNishtana, said in an interview. “You have Ashkenazi shuls (synagogues), Sephardi, Persian, Syrian, Russian, Bukharian, Egyptian, Moroccan. It’s about time we stopped being guests in other people’s houses.”…